ABSTRACT
In 1453 the Turks at last broke into Constantinople and destroyed the last vestiges of the Byzantine Empire. They inherited from Byzantium a legacy of Graeco-Armenian administration which continued to maintain the essential government machinery of empire. The commercial acumen and industry of the Armenians and the Greeks helped to keep the treasury solvent. The massacres of genocidal proportions at the close of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, obliterated the Armenians from their ancient homelands in central and eastern Anatolia and expelled the Greeks from western Anatolia.
